Continuing our special series on Brown Bag Films we caught up with the multi award winning director of ‘Anya’ Damien O’Connor and it’s awarding winning music composer Darren Hendley.

Anya is a five minute animated film, charting twenty years in the life of a Russian orphan. It is a unique initiative with the To Russia With Love charity to help raise funds for their ongoing charity work.

Damien has written and directed 5 short films –  ‘Mutt’, ‘Ledog’, IFTA nominated ‘Dick Terrapin’, ‘After You’ and ‘Anya’ which was made in association with To Russia with Love. He is also the Storyboard Supervisor/Episodic Director on Doc McStuffins for Disney Jr.

Congrats on all your wins for ANYA the latest being the Limerick Film Festival. How would you describe the idea behind ANYA, i.e. were you guys approached by the charity ‘To Russia with Love’ first or vice versa? How did it all come about?
Thanks! I received a phone call in work one day from To Russia With Love’s founder, Debbie Deegan. She asked if I would be interested in making a short animated advert for the charity, I explained that I didn’t think an ad would work. It would take ages to produce, cost a fortune and then get lost in the noise of the Internet. I had never spoken or met Debbie before but she was pretty insistent she wanted an advert and I spent a good 45 minutes declining. I eventually hung up and returned to my desk. Sitting in my inbox was an email, it was from Debbie, she wanted to know when I was going to start on the advert. I thought it was pretty amusing so I looked up the To Russia With Love website. I read the kids first-hand accounts of how they ended up in orphanages. It was all so heart breaking that I rang Debbie back and offered to make a short film instead. I figured a short film would reach a much wider audience and that we could also ask that people donate after watching – we looked on it as visual busking – the film equivalent of the charity calendar or Christmas single.

How do you approach a topic like the one in ANYA? Did you go through a process you go through with every project?
Anya was interesting because I had offered to make a film when I had nothing, no idea, no script and no money – so the first thing I did was read Debbie Deegan’s biography. I jotted down bits and pieces that struck a chord. Then I do the who, what, when, where approach. Who (an orphan), What (life improves thanks to charity intervention), When (the twenty years the charity have operated), Where (Russian orphanage). I used that to write up a one page outline. I sent it to Debbie who loved it, so I storyboarded it out and built an animatic… which I hated. The story was framed around a ‘once upon a time’ fairy tale story narration and it just felt like a long, morose charity ad. Around the same time I travelled to the orphanage to meet the kids. That trip changed everything (it was also the trip where I filmed the end credit sequence). The kids made it clear they were full of hope for the future, my original story was an outsiders point of view looking in, when it needed to be a story by the kids, for the kids. I went back to Dublin and removed all narration and swapped out the temp music to something more jaunty. The end still wasn’t working so I basically suffered for a miserable two weeks obsessing about it (is that a process?) before I came up with the ‘Mama’ window motif. Throughout all this the charity were great, they could easily have insisted I left in the narration to outline the great work they do, so I showed them the two versions and they agreed to go with the narration free one. Once I am happy with an animatic it becomes relatively easier – in that it becomes relatively harder to mess it all up. 82 people worked on Anya for 15 months, so you want all those people and all that time to be operating on a pretty solid foundation. Get the animatic right and everything from that point on will be embellishments as opposed to fixes.

What are you working on at the moment?
I am starting on a new short film idea looking at 40 years in the life of a French astronaut. I have done 60 years in the life of a Dublin doorman, 20 years in the life of a Russian orphan so it seems like a good fit. Other than that I spend a lot of time working as storyboard supervisor and occasional episodic director on Doc McStuffins for Disney Jnr.

See more of Damien’s work here on the Brown Bag labs blog.

Darren Hendley – Music Composer
Darren has composed music on numerous animations mostly for Brown Bag Films, including ‘The Octonauts‘, ‘After You‘, and of course the award winning ‘Anya‘.

Congrats on your all your success with ANYA. Do you work on the music and the animation side by side or do you fit the music to images? Generally what is your process behind approaching a project?
Yes the music and the animation were created side-by-side, after the first animatic a temporary music score was written. As the animation progressed towards the final picture the music was re-timed to fit the picture along the way and occasionally the picture was tweaked to sync with the timing of the music. The General process consists of a lot of discussion between the director and composer before any music is actually written to discuss various musical ideas and the decide what kind of emotion the music needs to evoke.

How important is that you get the right music to fit the animation? 
It was extremely important that the music fit with the animation and convey the emotion of the film, as there is practically no dialogue, the music had to carry the emotion completely.

PLEASE HELP TO RUSSIA WITH LOVE TO CONTINUE CHANGING THE LIVES OF ORPHANED AND ABANDONED CHILDREN TEXT HUG TO 50300 AND DONATE €4 (IRELAND ONLY) OR VISIT TO RUSSIA WITH LOVE TO DONATE ONLINE 100% of Text Cost goes to To Russia With Love across most network providers.